Kaspersky Labs have dug out an Android app that disguises itself as an innocuous media player app but is in fact a malicious virus application that hacks the owners’ mobile phone to subscribe their number to premium rate numbers that end up transferring money from the user’s account to the criminals’.
Kaspersky has identified the trojan as Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a and has noted that the app is available in the conventional .APK format of Android apps and weighs only 13kb in size. A number of Android devices are reported to have been affected though all the victims are at present identified inside Russia.
Kaspersky has noted that such malicious programs in fact ask for the user’s permission to offer access to premium rate services which are often blindly agreed to by users. You may remember a recent study conducted by BBC that showed how creating spyware applications for mobile phones was pretty easy.